It begins, perhaps aptly, by referring to a Christmas in Calcutta, albeit one that is imaginary, portrayed in a film made 44 years ago. Violet, abandoned by her two friends, walking back home — alone — with Shakespeare’s Lear and a mongrel for company on Christmas day, thus blurs the lines between imagination and reality. Hannah Arendt had made a compelling association between loneliness and the ascendancy of right-wing politics in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Yet, on joining the dots, what we get is a bleak — political — dimension of loneliness that is underexamined and disconcerting. But some ruptures — is loneliness not a rupture from a milieu, social and ecological, that was once familiar?

Source: The Telegraph December 25, 2025 02:15 UTC